There are a lot of books about emotional intelligence, but not many focused on the concept of being vulnerable.

Daring Greatly by Brené Brown changed my life in two ways. It educated me on a daily human phenomena that we know strikingly little about. And, it acted as an informal welcoming into a community I had been searching for.

We suppress & ignore vulnerability too often.

Yet, it's something that many of us are forced to experience on a daily basis. If we're not already facing vulnerability in our personal relationships, we're certainly exposed to it on a consistent basis as a part of our work.

Information can't hurt us, yet so many of us recoil at, or block entirely, the idea of making ourselves vulnerable (or open to/at risk of harm.) Daring Greatly helped me empathize with the human experience of being vulnerable, through the lens of other's (vs. my own.) It turns out, it's easier to relate-to, empathize, and be gentle with, other people's experience than our own. This book offers a re-frame of why we should take these risks as well as their implications on the overall health of our life.

A community for the emotional risk-taker.

Our society clearly values the brave and the uninhibited risk taker. But for the longest time, we've felt an urge to shun emotional transparency. This isn't a novel concept and today we're experiencing a wave of transformation in how people communicate their emotional experiences. That said, we're still overcoming the shift in perception of what is the "appropriate" level of sharing when it comes to emotional experience. This book helped me contextualize and understand the value of people like me, who take the risk and share what their experience feels like.

If you are at all interested in Emotional Intelligence, or Vulnerability specifically, I can't recommend this book enough.

(And if you've read it, do you agree? What other book would you recommend for beginners?)